The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

…The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

…Among recommendations is that the military eliminate policies that exclude women from combat units, phasing in additional career fields and units that they can be assigned to as long as they are qualified. A 1994 combat exclusion policy bans women from being assigned to ground combat units below the brigade level even though women have for years served in combat situations.

…Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. “I didn’t hear, `Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,'” Lyles said. “But I also didn’t hear, `We don’t want to be in combat.’ What they want is an equal opportunity to serve where their skills allow them to serve.”

by Sir John Hawkins

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You know why you don’t hear any “Rah, rah, we want to be in combat” talk? Because people know the truth that they’ll be flayed alive for speaking. Women aren’t as good at combat as men. Women aren’t as aggressive as men, they’re not as naturally violent as men, and they aren’t as physically capable as men. Putting women in the field may get them more promotions, but it’ll also get more men killed because the quality of our fighting force will drop. Even the people who’ll deny it publicly will know it’s true as they deny it.

Setting that aside, it’ll be men risking their lives unnecessarily out of chivalry — more pregnancies, a weakening of morale because men don’t want to see women killed, and maybe worse. It’s bad enough when our soldiers are tortured by the animals we fight. What are they going to do to any women they capture on the battlefield?

Getting beyond that, I love the tacit call for quotas in the report. It doesn’t matter if the white males have earned their promotions without racism being involved. We’ve got to promote women and minorities; we’ve got to throw merit out the window and make the percentages of officers look like America.

Here are some performance-based statistics worth noting that perhaps the diversity police who came up with this report should have spent more time considering,

When I checked on the Iraq War in 2007, American whites, relative to their share of the young population, were getting killed in combat at 1.86 times the rate of nonwhites.

In Afghanistan through 2009, whites were dying at a rate 2.47 times their share of the population of 20-24 year olds.

If the white soldiers are bleeding and dying on the battlefield at that rate, then maybe it makes a little more sense that they’re getting the lion’s share of the promotions.